Comments:

the panel with the empty flannel next to lola is really powerful like.. similar to what sugar was wearing and to lola's left when sugar would be sitting if they were still driving together. also the lighting in this scene is so nice, it adds to the mood of the scene (feels introspective, imo) of just being essentially by yourself in an unfamiliar place at night.

also lola looks so sad in panels 9 and 10 i want to give them a hug.. i hope they're feeling ok

the panel with the empty flannel next to lola is really powerful like.. similar to what sugar was wearing and to lola's left when sugar would be sitting if they were still driving together. also the lighting in this scene is so nice, it adds to the mood of the scene (feels introspective, imo) of just being essentially by yourself in an unfamiliar place at night.

also lola looks so sad in panels 9 and 10 i want to give them a hug.. i hope they're feeling ok

you can really feel the gaping hole where sugar used to be - particularly at the end here, echoing back to both the first and especially the third breather pages. there may not be a bloody nose for lola to wash clean, but that doesn't mean there's nothing else going down the drain. really excellent page.

Q^Q @ lola this whole page.... you drew the like, tired+sad when both hit and it's feeling augh. And even beyond lola's facial expressions with details such as the itme lapse on the phone it's like, gosh that's definitely relatable since i have at a lot of times kind of froze up wanting to say something but have trouble typing it out.

Also is the panel of lola in the lobby (?) (the panel right before the bathroom doors are shown) like, the lighting kind of looks like stylized ocean waves and is it supposed to tie in with lola washing her head in the ending panels?

i feel like part of it is the fact that they're going under another name, probs under the guise of being a cis girl, so this is probably to help keep the story straight if anyone catches them going to the bathroom. another theory is that it reminds them of sugar, which could be a solace to them.

ive been trying to gather my thoughts on this whole scene. And something i really like about it is like...the tension is sort of gone here. everything feels hollow, silent, static, distant. so distant. its like time has stopped. it's fascinating.

It's only just struck me that this whole page is drawing a connection between Sugar and Lola's mom, something I had never thought of before. Lola's mom was the first person to really want her to be a girl, and her resultant gender identity of "whatever you want" is fraught with resentment towards her mother and towards anyone else who wants to pin her down, the unspoken stipulation being "whatever you want, but I know that's not me, and when performing it gets to be too much, I'm gone." This line of thought held true with her mother, and we see hints of it happening all along with Sugar - her relative disengagement with Sugar's meltdown in the parking lot, her secret contemplation of calling for help, her subtle expressions of guilt over using painkillers to ease a tension unperceived by Sugar...she's constantly pulling back and assessing the scene, in a way that (she feels) makes her unable to engage fully and truthfully with Sugar, because she knows on some level that the identity Sugar is offering her is as destructive as the one her mother attempted to force on her. Her walking out on Sugar, then, forms a precise mirror of her walking out her mother; she simply couldn't maintain the relationship beyond that point (for very obvious reasons, in Sugar's case).

Afterwards, however, we see her consumed by regret, both for the broken relationship and for fulfilling the cycle of trauma again. I don't know if this was obvious to everyone else, but I don't think she's texting Sugar here; the message area in panels 3 & 4 is empty, and the name in panel 5 doesn't seem to line up with Sugar's. So she's either trying to text her mother, or someone else she's walked out on in the interim - either way, she's unsuccessful again, and it becomes a gesture known only to herself, like using the ladies' room in the dead of night. This is part of why she reacts so strongly when Sugar comes back, because it finally breaks the pattern of abandonment she had internalized, which at that moment she felt was destroying her more than human intimacy ever threatened to do (despite it being a literal life or death situation only hours earlier). So she casts aside her ambivalence and jumps wholeheartedly into the relationship again, in what can be seen as either the resolution of a lifelong trauma, or the beginning of a new cycle. Oof.

Would be eternally grateful to anyone who can track down the exact rest area depicted here; I searched google maps along the route from Flagstaff to Syracuse but didn't find any exact matches. For a hot second I was hoping it would be "Gray County Safety Rest Area" in Texas for ultimate synchronicity, but it looks like no.